Narcissism - An Evaluation

You may wonder what it has been like spending about 6 months reading up on narcissism. Quite frankly, quite a narcissistic exercise. I found the whole thing quite fascinating but quite self indulging and illuminating. As the topic is quite a broad subject, I had found myself focussing on introversion an idea originally introduced by Jung and debated between him and Freud. Whereas Jung thought it was a psychic strategy Freud was more interested in the levels of energy invested in it. I do find myself wondering whether differences in opinion or perception can sometimes be harnessed to save friendships and relationships. In this instance it seemed not by Jung, not being in the slightest interested in forming a biological basis for someone else’s opinion. All the same I found their arguments quite interesting but also intrusive into how I might interact from time to time with others. I suppose it is easier to focus on how someone else might exhibit narcissistic traits and forget that it exists to a lesser or greater degree in all of us.

I must say digging deep into the realm of the mind was initially rather scary. It did feel a bit safe at first attributing the traits to abnormal behaviour in adults until someone like Pearls identified that even normal people ‘hallucinate’ from time to time.

What really opened my mind about the topic was when I touched on the area of prejudice and it was Dalal that did it for me in his amazing explanation of how the fear of feeling being taken over by another could be associated with feelings of wanting or possessing something about them. I guess the pain being in the psychic emergence of ‘the other’.

Symington I had to read twice and he seemed to put it all into perspective that ‘all mental disturbances emerge from recognition of the other’. I wonder if anyone else agrees that there is a certain discomfort sometimes about others coming into an other’s personal space. And yet Fairbairn hypothesises that ‘relation is what we yearn for’.